-     Unexpired Foreign Passport with un-expired visa issued for six or more months and I-94
        stamp (Arrival and Departure Record).

  -     Unexpired Refugee Travel Document (I-571).

  -     Form I-94 (Arrival and Departure Record) stamped Asylee, Refugee, or INS Asylum
        Approval Letter.

  -     Unexpired Employment Authorization Card (I-688A, I-688B, I-766).

  -     Unexpired Resident Alien Card (I-551) (also known as Green Card).

  -     Unexpired United States Citizen Identification Card (I-197, I-179).

  -     Unexpired Diploma Certificate with Diplomat Identification Card issued by the United States
        Department of State.

These various forms of identification documentation are usually connected to the distinct person only through a name. Thus it is impossible to achieve a very high level of trust in the differential identity of a person as established by these documents. The primary reason for this is that there is no strong binding between the biophysical person and the document. For example, while a passport contains a picture, the document can still be of questionable trustworthiness because it may have been obtained by presenting a birth certificate, which doesn’t contain a picture. So the documents fail to fully meet the quantitative requirements that we stated in Chapter 9 for differential identity markers able to establish that a person is not an impostor. The reason that such systems work at all with some level of efficacy is because most people are not in the business of beating the system, and they have established moderately verifiable forensic trails during the course of their lives. However, for the serious adversary, creating an identity through the forgery of source documents is relatively straightforward.

Before going further in our discussion, we want to emphasize that in some situations, this adversary stance may in fact be our friend. For the French Resistance in World War II, forged identity was the way of survival. This, of course, is the ongoing dilemma with identification systems; they can be used for good but also perverted for ill. In the following, we will illustrate clearly the technical underpinning of a formal identification system. We will ascertain that our description brings clarity to the evaluation of the positives and negatives associated with the use of such a system in a given social order. However, the choices made following this evaluation are dependent on further elements of trust associated with such an order. As we will now see, these choices are not binary, but rather a matter of selection amongst various tools and possibilities.

Since the most common denominator in existing, credential based experiential identification is a name, the first step to associate an experiential identification system with a biometry based differential identification system is to attach a name to the biometric markers in the differential identity registry. The name then forms the seminal point of experiential identity for a person. In Chapter 9, when we discussed the concept of identity in some detail, we ascribed the term anchored persona to this connection point between differential identity and experiential identity. This is similar to existing systems in which a name is specified on a birth certificate. So, we would like to consider how to bring into being a “birth certificate equivalent” based on the trust infrastructure of a biometry based differential identification system. Now, the use of any identity credential, including a birth certificate, requires a significant vetting and issuance process by a trusted third party if any significant level of trust is to be ascribed to it. So, a rather interesting question is “What trusted third party can be used to connect a name to a differential identity?” Moreover, “What technical means make the connection of a name to a differential identity such that during repetitive interactions it can be affirmed, to a high degree of trust, that the person

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